Monday, March 16, 2015

The next morning we were determined to catch
the first mini-bus to Goma, a city sitting on Lake Kivu, one of Africa’s Great
Lakes and one of three exploding lakes in the world. Once we were in Goma,
along the Rwandan border, we knew we’d be out of harm’s way.

Or would we?

We got to the mini-bus station in Butembo at
7:30 and were among the first passengers to arrive. We made a major mistake not
sitting in the first row alongside the driver. The mini-bus was an outdated
Japanese model with five rows and fifteen seats total. David and I sat in one
of the passenger rows and, as it quickly filled up, realized just how
uncomfortable this was going to be.

The mini-bus driver wouldn’t leave until there
were five people sitting in each row, which was built to hold three. Each
person was forced to sit completely perpendicular to the row directly in front
of him.

The trip was excruciatingly painful, even more
than the ride to Butembo. I had no choice but to stand up and align my back
with the mini-bus’ ceiling for long stretches of time.

“Congo people treat each other like cattle,” an
obese elderly woman on the other side of our row said to us in English. “No one
cares about life or death in this country or how anybody feels.”

“It’s good we’re leaving,” David said to me
with a nod.

We stopped at various towns where the driver
would chat with his buddies or leave to buy groceries, but wouldn’t let anyone out
for a short break. He even locked the door so no one had a chance to get out.
All the passengers passively stayed inside, too uncomfortable to complain.

We were, however, able to open up the windows,
but when we did, local peddlers would stuff in whatever goods they could,
literally in our face. At one point, I thought the elderly Congolese woman
sitting in our row was going to suffocate from all the bundles of onion grass
being pushed up in her face.

Military checkpoints were the one place our
driver never stopped. Each time we arrived at a checkpoint, he accelerated to
blaze past the soldiers on duty. The soldiers manning the posts would try to
run after us. The driver would throw a fistful of francs out the window, and
they’d cease their chase and wave at our fleeing vehicle to say thanks.

Eight hours later at Goma, my legs and back
were so stiff I could initially only walk at half my normal pace. This made us
easy prey for a tout to walk alongside us and bring us to a hotel of his
choosing. The tout was a short, friendly character who looked like he had some
Pygmy background in him. He told us he dreamed of becoming a doctor one day and
that escorting folks like us was just a way for him to make some cash on the
side.

He took us to a hotel in a somewhat
seedy-looking part of town that had a bar and brothel attached. We were
escorted to our room by a two hundred pound Congolese prostitute with partially
dyed blonde hair, atrocious makeup, and a nice amount of facial hair sprouting
from her chin. She tried to rub my back with her hand to gauge my sexual
interest in her, but her touch startled me to such a degree that I jumped back
in fear.

The room itself was small with only one bed for
David and me to share. There was a strong stench of body odor too. But it had a
sink with running water, a working light bulb, and a place on the door knob to
put our own lock. We were only going to be staying that night and the following
night, since our plan from the start was to cross into Rwanda on April 11, my
mother’s birthday.

Goma was the epicenter of the refugee crisis
stemming from the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and was a central battleground
during the first and second Congo wars in the late 1990s and early 2000s. To
add insult to injury, in 2002 Goma was in the direct path of volcanic eruption
of Mount Nyiragongo's eruption.The lava stream measured two hundred to a thousand meters wide. The lava
destroyed more than forty percent of the city and more than a hundred people
were killed by asphyxiation from the massive release of carbon dioxide.

The aftermath of Niyragongo's eruption in 2002. The city of Goma was completely leveled.

There were no paved roads in Goma. All vehicles
travel over carefully placed gravel to reach their destinations. Thousands of
inhabitants wandered the streets aimlessly, trying to pick up any type of odd
job that would net them a few thousand francs. But due to all the recent chaos,
many of the buildings there are fairly new, giving the city a cheerful appeal.

Compared to where we’d been, Goma was an
exciting boom-town brimming with opportunity and potential. We marveled at the
array of goods on display in the grocery stores and the variety of restaurants.
That we were able to eat at Indian food made us feel like we’d emerged from the
wilderness for good.

There were white people too! Hundreds of them,
mostly foreign transplants temporarily living in Goma working in professions
geared towards turning chaos into order. We made it, we told ourselves. We
casually approached foreigners on the streets, in the markets, at restaurants,
and asked them what they were doing in the DRC. We heard the same story over
and over about working for some NGO or the UN.

“What are you doing here?” they’d ask us in
response.

“Oh you know, we’re just traveling,” we’d
answer, to which we’d receive a number of responses.

“You’re what?!”

“Traveling?! Is that even possible in Congo?”

“In three years of living here, you’re the
second and third travelers I’ve seen. The only other one was a crazy Japanese
guy.”

Listening to their stories of leaving Goma via
plane or armored convoy only increased the degree of awesomeness we felt.

On our last night in Congo our stories of
adventure managed to get us invited to a house party at a mansion on the banks
of Lake Kivu. The soiree was hosted by an American woman serving as the
director of an NGO focused on child welfare. There, David and I feasted on
delicious hors d’oeuvres and drank nice glasses of wine. For the first time in ten
days, we enjoyed pleasant and intellectually stimulating conversation with
people other than ourselves.

At the end of the night, the hostess
recommended we wait around the neighborhood for motorcycle taxi drivers to pick
us up and take us back to our hotel, less than a kilometer away. David and I
thanked her for the suggestion, but we had other plans for getting home.

We were ready to leave for Rwanda early the
next morning, so this would conceivably be our last experience in Congo. We
chose to stroll back to our hotel taking in the city’s scenery and nightlife
and marvel at what we’d done on our trip. The path was fairly well-lit and
patrolled by police officers every few blocks, so we figured we’d be safe.

It was mostly quiet and peaceful as we walked,
except for the distant thumping of music from a few nearby bars and nightclubs.

When we turned off the main road on to the dark
side street where our hotel was, a gang of five young Congolese, three men and
two women, approached us. Their leader, a muscular aggressive man who could
have been any age, offered David and me a fist bump and greeting.

“Ca va? Tres bien?” he asked as we politely pounded his fists.
How are you? Everything is good? “Ja bra! Rastafari! Rastafari!”

In East Africa, a lot of criminals will try to
gain their prey’s trust by saying they are Rastafarians, a religion that
theoretically espouses a philosophy of peace and brotherly love. Every time
someone bragged he was a Rastafarian, my stomach tightened up.

The gang leader continued to babble something
incomprehensible in French, while the rest of his gang stood by silently. When
he stopped talking, he unexpectedly swung his hand in the direction of my front
right pocket, apparently trying to reach for my wallet.

I pushed his hand away and stepped back further
into the darkness. David did the opposite, backing up onto the well-lit main
road. My predator screamed with frustration.

Before I could even think or just move out of
the way, he picked up a massive rock lying that measured almost a meter in
length came up to me fast, then threw it just high enough for it to land
directly on top of me.

I was lucky I managed to deflect the rock with
my left arm and watch it fall back to the ground.

If the rock had landed on my head I would have
been dead. If he had thrown it at my foot, it would have caused serious damage
and my stay in Africa would have been finished.

Sadly, what it did do was dislocate my
shoulder. Dislocations are agonizing. I was unable to stand up straight or move
my arm in any direction. I was totally incapacitated and vulnerable. Scared and
completely unable to defend myself, I lay on my back on the ground and
protected my injured shoulder and arm as best I could.

One of the other men in the gang, clearly
nervous that his leader had severely injured someone, went through my front
pockets trying to steal everything I had. Once he was satisfied he’d cleaned me
out for good, he and the others ran away.

David found me lying on the ground and helped
me up. I went through my pockets and saw those assholes didn’t even find my
money because I’d been lying on top of it while trying to protect myself. The
only thing the gang made off with was my head flashlight and a broken mobile
phone that had been given to me by a Lebanese businessman we’d met earlier.
Ironically, if my attacker had simply asked me for money, I would have given it
to him. I wasn’t walking around at night in the Congo with my passport or lots
of cash and credit cards. I had the equivalent six dollars tucked away in my
back pocket.

David was scratched up as well. While my
pockets were being checked, the two women in the group had thrown rocks at him
too, though much smaller ones. Most of their rocks missed him, but he did get
pelted a few times in his thighs and waist.

We saw three motorcycle taxi drivers parked a
twenty meters away watching us. They saw the whole thing and hadn't to lift a
finger to help us.

I was in agonizing pain, but I managed to
remain fairly calm. We got to our hotel and went to our room wondering what to
do: Should we immediately get our things and somehow try to get to a hospital
in Rwanda or go to the nearest medical clinic in Goma?

With every passing second, I was in danger of
suffering long-term shoulder damage. David grabbed all the cash we had left, no
more than seventy dollars in total, and hailed the motorcycle drivers to take
us to the nearest hospital.

“Hôpital! Hôpital!” he shouted, stirring two of the drivers to action.

David helped me sit up on the backseat of one
of the motorcycles as I cradled my useless left arm. He hopped on the back of
the other and we were driven a few bouncy kilometers over gravel roads to a
medical clinic. When we got off the motorcycles, David offered the drivers a
sum they believed was too little. Disgusted by them for not helping us before
and for being petty now, David took out another five hundred franc bill, spat
in it, and threw it at the ground before escorting me inside the building.

We sat in the waiting room with three other
people in much worse shape than me. They also looked like they’d been attacked
by rocks. Unlike me, they were bleeding from head wounds and fading in and out
of consciousness. A male doctor came to speak to us and told us that they would
only begin giving me medical treatment if we paid a sum of four hundred dollars
in cash. David dumped out the remaining seventy dollars we had in Congolese
francs, pulled his pockets inside out, and conveyed that that was literally all
the money we had left. The doctor relented.

First, a female nurse cut off my black
long-sleeve short and took an X-ray of my shoulder. The X-ray confirmed I did
not have a break or a fracture, just a complete dislocation. Next, I was
brought into another room with a mattress on the floor and another female nurse
preparing an IV. The doctor entered the room and put on surgical gloves. They
were planning to make me unconscious before putting my shoulder back into
place.

That was when I really got scared. I was
terrified of having a dirty needle stuck in my arm in the Congo. God knew if
their equipment was sanitary. I tried to show them with my limited French and
hand signals that I preferred if they just sat me in a chair and forcefully put
my shoulder together without any anesthetic. I knew it would hurt like hell,
but the pain would be temporary.

Regrettably, the two nurses and medic refused
to do things the way I wished and prodded me to lie down on the mattress on my
right side. I acquiesced as one of the nurses stuck an IV in my hand. David sat
in a chair facing me so that I wouldn’t feel alone.

As I felt the anesthetic flow, I realized I had
no idea what I was being injected with. I didn’t know if it was the right
chemical or the appropriate dosage. I estimated there was a fifty-fifty chance
whatever it was would cause my heart to stop and I’d be dead on the spot.

I began talking to God. Prayer isn’t an
accurate way to describe what I was doing because I felt compelled to apologize
more than request to be saved. I apologized for my arrogance and stupidity at
thinking I could make it through one of the most dangerous places on Earth
without harm. I apologized for the pain that my death would cause my family and
friends, on my mother’s birthday no less.

“I am sorry for being such a selfish asshole,”
I repeated out loud, wondering if I would ever wake up again.

“The last words you actually said were, ‘He
threw a rock at me,’” David said with a smirk when I opened my eyes forty
minutes later.

I glanced down at myself and saw that my arm
was safely back in place and taped up in a sling.

“I watched the whole thing,” David continued.
“I think they fixed you up pretty professionally. You can’t take off that sling
for a few hours though.”

That meant I wouldn’t be able to wear a t-shirt
properly for the rest of the day. No worries, I told myself. That was the least
of my troubles.

David and I returned to our hotel and tried to
sleep for a couple hours. It was impossible. My shoulder was sore, but that
wasn’t the reason. I couldn’t sleep because I was filled with so much pent up
rage over what had just happened. No matter what I did I couldn’t fall asleep.
After two hours, I woke David up and told him I had to leave the DRC as soon as
possible.

David carried one of my backpacks for me as we
made our way by foot to the border crossing.While we passed through border control, two English-speaking
Congolese policemen asked what happened to me. After telling them about the
attack, they said they were surprised no policeman was there to stop it.

“Nothing else works in your country,” I said
bitterly. “Why should the police force?”

I took my passport back after getting my
glorious exit stamp, gazed out at the Rwandan countryside, and never looked
back at Congo again.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

A hundred steps from the police station was a
gold Toyota Camry sedan with its four doors and trunk wide open. Its driver, a
big burly man wearing a plaid button-down shirt leaned on the hood staring at
the screen of his low-end cell phone. A man sitting in the front passenger’s
seat whistled to get his attention when we walked by. The driver abruptly put
his cell phone down and ran up to us asking, “Butembo? Butembo?”

Amazed that we’d found a ride out of the city
right before dark, we readily agreed to pay fifteen dollars for each of us for
the four-hour journey, a large amount of money considering the relatively short
distance. We put our backpacks in the trunk and comfortably seated ourselves in
the backseat of the Camry.

Under no other circumstances would we have been
so excited to get to a city like Butembo, which is known as the rape capital of
the world because of the tremendous abuse against women that occurred there
during the Congo wars.

“Nous allons?” David asked the driver. Are we going?

The driver shook his head.

“Plus de gens,” the driver said. More people.

Technically speaking, there was room for one
more person in the backseat with us; perhaps two if we really squeezed in
tightly.

Five minutes later we got our fourth and fifth
fellow travelers, two men traveling with what looked like a couple hundred
kilograms of unripe bananas. As they loaded their produce into the trunk, David
told me he hoped his digital camera would be okay.

With a cramped car of six passengers, we
thought we were ready to go. Yet we still remained parked in Kamanda.

“How many people can you possibly fit into a
five seat Camry?” I asked David.

The answer is nine. Nine full-grown adult
passengers inside a mid-size Japanese sedan, three in front and six in back.

The journey was painful, physically and
psychologically. I found myself sitting next to the left-side back seat window
with my shoulder furiously scrunched up and a woman who smelled like death
sitting on my knee with her unwashed back and shirt brushing my face. A large
man a few persons down on the right extended his hand and arm so that it
reached around my neck.

David’s seating arrangement wasn’t much more
comfortable. He had the advantage of being smaller so he got to sit on top of
some of the backseat passengers leaning forward into the front seat.

The power windows didn’t go down all the way,
so I spent the ride trying to stick my face up to the narrow window opening to
gasp for fresh air.

“I need to eat, Michael,” David stammered to me
at one point during the ride. “My body is fading. I’m not sleepy, but it’s hard
for me to stay awake. I can’t concentrate on anything.”

It was pitch black when we arrived in Butembo.
The Camry parked in an area with only one streetlight flickering in the
distance and a lone policeman patrolling the street. We got out of the Camry
very slowly. Our bodies felt like they were twisted into pretzels during the
journey and we were nervous about pulling a muscle. We waited for the hundreds
of kilograms of bananas to be taken out of trunk so we could get our bags.
David muttered over and over how badly he needed to eat.

We grabbed our bags as soon as we could and
handed the driver the franc equivalent of fifteen dollars each and began
walking away. Standing next to the driver was his friend, another large, husky
man, who had apparently met the car where it parked.

When the driver finished counting the money, he
and his friend rushed up to us and grabbed us by our backpacks.

“Vingt cinq!” he barked at us. Twenty-five!

“Non!
Quinze! Quinze!” I shouted back at him.

“Vingt cinq!”

I couldn’t believe it. We had agreed on a price
before we left Butembo and now he was changing it.

“Michael, I’ve got to get out of here,” David
pleaded. “I’m about to collapse.”

The driver’s friend standing next to him then
abruptly intervened.

“Boys, the cost of the journey is twenty-five
dollars,” he said sternly. “Now pay your driver right now!”

“The cost of the journey is fifteen dollars,” I
yelled back. “The driver is a liar!”

“Give him twenty dollars more for the two of you
because that was the price!”

“I said we already paid! Your driver friend
agreed with us that the price was ‘quinze dollars.’ You’re the French speaker. You tell me what that means!”

“Listen to me white boy! You don’t come to my
country and tell me what my friend said. I tell you what you have to pay and
you pay it!”

The police officer patrolling the block saw the
commotion and ran over to get involved.

And just like that, without thinking through
what exactly it was we were about to do, I grabbed David’s arm and told him to
run as fast as he could. We ran on pure adrenaline wearing our heavy backpacks
and just prayed those two men wouldn’t catch up with us. If they’d caught us,
who knows what kind of trouble we would have found ourselves in? I’m not
entirely sure, but I think the Congolese police officer who ran over to
intervene ordered the men not to chase us down.

We must have only run a few hundred meters
before our bodies gave out. Thankfully, only another ten meters away was a
convenience store stocked with food. The manager, a tall thin man in his
twenties, readily let us inside and led us straight for the preservatives
section, where we found mini-hot dogs, corn, carrots, bread and potato chips.
We basically forced our money into the manager’s hand and sat down on the floor
of his shop stuffing our faces. It was one of the best meals of my life.

It must have been quite a shock for the manager
to meet two starving, forlorn white men covered in filth who smelled like God
knows what. Presumably the only white people he'd ever seen before were UN or
NGO workers traveling around in fancy sport utility vehicles with armed body
guards securing them from harm. Once we finished eating, we asked him to help
us find a hotel where we could spend the night.

He called up a friend of his who had a
guesthouse down the street and explained to us how to get there. When we
arrived, his friend took us to a room that lacked running water and electricity,
and said it would cost us ten dollars a night. Without hesitating, we said we’d
take it.

We slept blissfully for ten solid hours. When
we woke up, however, the stress of our present situation struck us immediately.

“Fucking hell! Are you serious?!” David
screamed to no one in particular. “Michael, the lens on my camera is completely
broken! My camera is fucked! It was crushed by the two hundred kilograms of
bananas that were on top of our bags! I hate this country!”

David bought his digital camera just three
weeks earlier in Kampala. Considering that our previous night’s driver had
tried to take extra money from us after the least comfortable car ride of our
lives, the destruction of David’s camera only made us more upset. After buying
some bananas and bread from the same store from the night before, we spent the
next few hours hunting for a camera repair shop, but nothing we found was able
to salvage it.

Just to give you an idea of where Butembo is located. David's camera had been crushed by 200 kilograms of bananas, so we were not able to take more photos for the rest of our time in the Congo.

Resentful and once again very hungry, we sat
down at a food hut staffed by women. The place served rice, beans, and mystery
meat. We ordered what they had along with two nice cold Fanta soft drinks.

The food was edible, but by no means a
delicious treat. Before we dug in, one of the female employees told us the meal
would cost a total of 4,100 francs, or around $4.50. After we finished eating,
I went up to the woman and handed her 4,500 francs, expecting to get four
hundred francs back in change. She took the money and waved her hand at me as
if to tell me that the transaction was complete.

I stayed where I stood and asked for my four
hundred francs. She and the other women working with her laughed out loud at my
request and shooed me away with their hands. I understood that four hundred
francs was an extremely insignificant amount of money, less than fifty cents,
but I was not in the mood to let something like that pass.

I slammed my hands on the counter and asked one
more time for my money back. The woman I’d been dealing with glared at me and
uttered a bitter, “Non.”

Fine, I told myself. They want to keep my four
hundred francs. Great. I’ll help myself to two more Fanta drinks from the
refrigerator they left unlocked in the main sitting area. I grabbed the two
drinks, approached the women one last time, and smiled.

They shook their heads from side to side and
demanded I hand them over the drinks. The value of the two Fantas, especially
the glass bottles themselves, was much more than a measly four hundred francs.
When someone finishes a drink from a glass bottle in many parts of the
developing world, the seller will almost always ask for the bottle back to make
money from the recycling.

I returned to where David was sitting and
explained that I had a point I needed to make. David followed me as I walked
outside the food hut. I saw that the women working there were coming outside as
well. I was ready to return the two bottles as soon as I had my four hundred
francs. But instead of offering me the money, the women picked up big rocks
from the ground and threatened to hurl them at us.

People walking around outside stopped to watch
the unfolding situation. This actually wasn’t the first time women had
threatened David and me with rocks. We were nearly attacked in Kampala by a pack
of Ugandan prostitutes angry at us for refusing their services.

As I stared at the women’s faces as they
prepared to stone us, all I felt inside me was contempt and hatred for them and
their country. I completely lost my mind.

I let out a scream and smashed the two Fanta
bottles together. Glass and soda went flying in all directions. The women
immediately jumped back a step. Now carrying two broken glass bottles and
covered with shards of glass and fizzy liquid, I walked towards the women
feeling so much rage I was ready to kill. All over fifty cents.

The food hut women were just as startled as I
was. Realizing just how insane I might actually be, they dropped their rocks
and raced back inside their establishment. The other people around us backed up
utterly convinced I was a dangerous mad man. At that moment, I definitely was.

The rest of the day brought us some better
times. While hiking through the dusty villages immediately outside Butembo’s
city limits, we were followed for hours by a pack of roughly fifty elementary
school-age children who acted as if we were celebrities. They may have spent
most of their time with us begging for biscuits and bon-bons, but the humor and authentic
friendliness gave us some much-needed good feeling.

Monday, March 9, 2015

We woke up early the next morning, took our
bags, and walked back to the military post where we were hassled for bribes a
couple nights before. One of the soldiers who had watched in awe as we pitched our
tent was back on duty at his post. We approached him and asked in French when
the next bus was to Beni or Butembo, a city of 200,000 fifty kilometers south
of Beni.

“Une semaine,” he answered without expression. One week.

“Impossible,” we said in response. “Sept jours non bus?” Seven days no bus?

The soldier nodded his head. We walked around
for about fifteen minutes asking locals and other soldiers the same question.
Unfortunately, each time we got the same answer. There was no way we were
staying in Epulu for a whole week. Then we would be in danger of overstaying
our transit visas and would run into real trouble with the military. We had no
choice.

“We have to hitchhike,” David said.

We put down our bags on the side of the road
and pointed our fingers towards the ground to signal to passing truck drivers
that we wished to travel with them. Once again, the soldiers couldn’t believe
their eyes. White men hitchhiking with Congolese truck drivers? A Congolese
soldier standing about six foot six and a four and a half foot tall Pygmy man
stood side-by-side staring at us, as if we were the spectacle.

The Congolese soldier (standing) and Pygmy man (sitting) looking out for a truck for us to hitchhike with out of Epulu.

We waited roughly twenty minutes for a truck to
stop. When it did, the driver said he was traveling to Kisengani. East was in
the opposite direction, he informed us.

“Shit!” I yelled out.

We’d just wasted twenty minutes hailing trucks
traveling in the wrong direction. We crossed the road and started over.

Another twenty minutes passed by and a truck
stopped. We told him where we wanted to go and he said he’d take us to Komanda,
a town about half way, for one hundred dollars each. We resoundingly said no.
Then he tried for eighty. We still said no. Then he drove off. While we waited
for another truck to stop, I wondered if we should have just taken his offer
and forked over the cash.

Luckily another truck with three men inside
stopped less than five minutes later. We asked them where they were headed and
they also said Komanda. Before they could name a price, we offered them twenty
dollars a person, an unheard of sum for transportation in other parts of East
Africa. The men bargained with us a little and eventually we settled for
thirty. Just so we didn’t have any problems later, we made sure we got the
franc/dollar exchange rate settled up front.

The ride was long and uncomfortable, but
thankfully uneventful. We sat behind the two main passenger seats on top of our
bags and leaned against the wall. Our companions didn’t try talking to us much.
They just played a cassette of ten Congolese pop songs over and over for the
duration of our six-hour journey. Thankfully, the truck’s tires held up. It’s
amazing how much less time a trip takes when there’s no need to replace flat
tires three times.

We arrived in Komanda around two o’clock in the
afternoon and were, naturally, hungry. The town’s streets were packed with
hundreds of men, presumably with no jobs and nothing useful to do. During the
Congo wars, the town's entire population was forced to flee from the different
militias and hide out in the forest. These people knew extreme cruelty and
instability, and were also fairly good at not being productive.

David went up to a group of men sitting on a
street corner and asked if they could recommend a place to eat. One of the men
abruptly stood up and shouted in English, “Give me money white man!”

Shocked and frightened, we hurried away. The
men stayed where they were, pointing and laughing loudly. This caused a lot of
the other men in the area to notice us as well. All of a sudden we heard people
running up behind us, smacking our bags, hissing loudly, and shouting to give
them money. No one actually attacked us, but we knew someone could at any
second.

Five minutes in Komanda was enough time to know
it was a place we wanted to get the hell out of. We eventually located a small
restaurant on a side street with a real kitchen. We dumped our bags at the
nearest table and asked the owner what there was to eat. We were starving and
on the brink of willing to pay any price for some food.

The owner just shook his head from side to side
with his eyes closed. We knew what that meant. There was no food in his
restaurant. Anxious about going back outside and wandering around aimlessly, we
remembered glimpses of a marketplace. Refusing to leave his restaurant, we told
the man we’d buy the food and pay him money if he cooked up whatever we
purchased from the market and brought back. Clearly lacking the energy to
refuse us and perhaps a bit hungry himself, he agreed.

I volunteered to go out to the market and leave
David with the bags. I left my passports and wallet with him and only took the
few thousand francs I needed to get some basics. Thankfully, the marketplace
was close and was manned by mostly female peddlers. I quickly scrounged up
eggs, tomatoes, an onion, and rice and raced back to the restaurant to find the
owner already boiling water.

Twenty minutes later he presented us with his
concoction. After one bite we knew something was very, very wrong. The food
tasted totally off, as if it was cooked with something rotten or poisonous.
Were there pesticides on the vegetables? Were the eggs rotten? Did the
restaurant put something funny in our food in an attempt to kill us and rob us?
We had no idea. We were in shock someone could mess up eggs, rice, tomatoes,
and onion so severely. Mad beyond belief and concerned about getting out of
town while there was still sunlight, we paid the man for his “service,” bought
some bananas at the market, and hustled out of town as fast as we could on the
main road.

We slowed our pace when cars and trucks passed
us. We waved to them, but none stopped. We were watching local children kick
around a deflated soccer ball on the opposite side of the main road when three
men on loud motorcycles pulled up and parked ahead of us in the direction we
were walking. As they got down from the bikes, David and I quickly took stock
of them.

They were wearing torn, faded t-shirts and
ripped khaki pants to go with their dusty baseball hats and shabby plastic
sandals. They looked like homeless people about to ask for some change. We
didn’t know who these men were or what they wanted, but at that moment the only
thing David and I cared about was getting out of there on the next truck.

“Why should we show you our documents?” David retorted aggressively back in English. David and
I were in no mood to speak in French to these guys. If they wanted something
from us they were going to have to speak our language.

“The documents, sir!” the man demanded again.

“Why should I give you my documents? Who the
hell are you?”

“We are secret police.”

David and I looked our new friends up and down
as if to say, “You can’t be serious.” These guys were dressed and smelled like
they’d just wandered out of a garbage dump. And they expected us to believe
they were law enforcement officials?

“You show me your documents!” David challenged.
“If you show me your documents showing you are a policeman, then I will show
you my documents showing that I am a tourist.”

A tractor-trailer approached our position.
David and I picked up our bags and ran out to the road and tried to flag it
down. The trailer began to slow, but one of the three motorcyclists walked out
to the road and signaled to the driver to ignore us and continue on his way.
Whoever these men were, they were trouble.

“The documents!” the leader of the group
shouted more forcefully. “I am secret police!”

“If you’re police, then where’s your
identification?!” David shouted. “You show me your identification, then I’ll
show you mine! You get it?!”

David, normally the more diplomatic of the two
of us, was starting to lose his cool due to hunger and stress. He and I weren’t
taking full stock of the situation. It wasn’t smart since we really didn’t have
any idea who they were. All we wanted was to get on a truck out of that
hellhole and those guys were stopping us from doing just that.

We didn’t think these men were part of a gang
or a rebel group trying to kidnap us because they would have done it by then.
They also didn’t act like they wanted to rob us, since they hadn’t asked for
any money. Whoever they were, they started to attract a small crowd of
interested passersby curious to see what our dispute was all about.

The main guy who’d been speaking to us suddenly
walked away, hopped on his bike, and sped away leaving his two cronies guard
us.

“Fuck!” David screamed at the top of his lungs
throwing the smaller of his two backpacks at the ground. “This country fucking
sucks!”

The ten or so people standing around watched
him silently, probably wondering why this white man was so outraged. David’s
anger compelled me to remain calm. I didn’t feel like telling him it was going
to be okay or that I was sure there was a reasonable explanation for this
because I really had no idea. What I did know was that our situation wasn’t
going to get better with the both of us out of control.

I stood silently near David as he fumed.
Fifteen minutes later the man from the “secret police” returned. This time,
when he got off his bike he went to speak to the two other men and ignored us
completely. Five minutes later, two Congolese policemen in full uniform
approached us on foot.

“Fuck!” David yelled again. “These homeless
assholes are the secret police?! What the fuck is wrong with this place?!”

Our nemesis must have told them we were pretty
agitated because the main police officer who came to speak with us in his
minimal English was very non-confrontational. He asked to see our passports,
which we then readily showed him, and told us all we had to do was go back to
the police station for registration.

“But we’re not in your town. We’re trying to
leave the town,” I tried to explain calmly. “We’re on our way to Rwanda. We
don’t need to register if we’re not planning on being in the town.”

“No!” David yelled again as he once again threw
his backpack at the ground. “We need to get out of this town, Michael. This
town is bad news! I don’t trust any of these motherfuckers!”

“All we have to do is register and then we’ll
be off on our way,” I reasoned. “That’s what the policeman said. Let’s just do
this as fast as possible so we’ll get back on our way.”

How naïve I was. Led by the two policemen and
trailed by the men on motorcycles, we returned to the center of town to a
decrepit dark green building that functioned as the local police headquarters.
We were told to sit in a shabby room with chipped paint on the floor and to
hand over our passports so that one of the police officers could write down our
details.

For more than twenty minutes, David and I
watched as the police officer filled out a simple one-page form for each of us.
He drew the letters of the alphabet so slowly I became convinced he was
basically illiterate.

When he finally finished, I asked for our
passports back. The soldier shook his head and sat at his desk silently. A few
moments later I made the same demand again. Once again, he shook his head
unfazed. I paced around the room frantically as David sat in his seat. Finally,
I snapped.

The police officer looked at me completely
clueless, which only added fuel to my fire.

“Passeport!
Passeport!” I howled at him threateningly. Then I picked
up the pen he’d used to fill out the forms and bent it totally out of shape,
before sitting back down next to David. The police officer looked at me like I
was nuts. And, I was nuts.

“You just broke that guy’s pen!” David said.

“He wouldn’t give me my passport back!” I said
in my own defense.

The soldier rose from his chair and sped out of
the office. Five minutes later, he returned flanked by a middle-aged man with
deep wrinkles wearing civilian clothes and a bright-eyed younger man with a
friendly grin carrying another chair. The middle-aged man took the chair, sat
down, and gazed at us with stern serious eyes.

“I am chief of police. You are criminal,” he
said in broken English. “Your Congo visa is invalide.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand your English,” I
said mockingly. “We’ve done your registration. Now it’s time to leave.”

“You are under arrest,” the younger man said in
perfectly clear English. We later found out he was an English teacher by
profession who was occasionally pulled in to work with the police. “He says
your visas are invalid. You have crossed into Orientale Province without proper
visas. Your visas are only acceptable for North Kivu Province. This is a
serious issue. This makes you criminals. You are now in jail. ”

“No, our visas are for the Democratic Republic
of Congo. We can go to whatever province we please. We’re not staying here.
We’re on vacation and we’re leaving now.”

“No you will not. You will very shortly undergo
interrogation.”

The two policemen and their translator then
quickly left the room and locked us inside. If David and I had been thinking
and acting rationally, we would have started to panic. We were under arrest in
one of the most dangerous countries in the world. If the policemen decided to
shoot us and bury our bodies behind the station, no one would have ever known
what happened. But we weren’t thinking rationally. To cope, we each took a book
out from our backpacks and silently started to read.

The policemen and the translator returned
thirty minutes later and snapped to get our attention. We ignored them,
continuing to read.

“What is this?!” the chief of police asked."A book. Ever heard of it?" I snarled.

The police chief sat down in front of us
flanked by the other two and spoke to us in what we think was French. After
every few sentences the translator repeated what he’d said in English. Basically
he explained that we had illegal visas, which was a “very grave” offense in
Congo. He said we could be jailed for many months for such an offense, possibly
even transferred to a prison deep in another province. He asked us how we felt
about going to prison for a long time in the Congo.

“We don’t feel any way about it because I’m
going to get on the phone with the American embassy in Kinshasa and make sure
they send someone to have your testicles ripped off,” I said. “How do you feel
about getting your testicles ripped off?”

The police chief’s eyes grew wide when the
English translator sheepishly explained what I’d said. The three men left the
room to reevaluate the situation and locked us inside once more. When they
returned, the police chief asked us where we were trying to go. Goma, we
replied, to cross the border into Rwanda. He responded by telling us he could
have us put on a bus to the border of Uganda in the east or Angola in the west.

“We are traveling to Goma,” David said firmly.
“We have no business going to Uganda or Angola.”

The five of us sat in the room in silence for
the next fifteen minutes. Bored and wanting to show our host some more disdain,
David and I picked up our books and started reading. When the police chief
spoke again, he unleashed an interesting new theory.

“Vous êtes CIA!” he declared. “You are CIA!”

We each cracked a smile. We knew our
interrogator was starting to break.

“He says you are spies from the CIA,” the
translator elaborated. “He says he thinks you are hiding a gun in your bag.”

“Tell him he can check my bag,” I challenged.
“We’re not spies. We don’t have guns. We just want to leave.”

The police chief stood up and paced around the
room before shouting something in rapid-fire French.

“He says you must be spies because your
passports are forged,” the translator explained. “He says your passport says
you are fifteen years old!”

“Quinze? Quinze?” the police chief yelled out at us as he held up our passports. Fifteen?! Fifteen?! He seemed quite confident he’d caught us doing
something bad, but David and I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Oh my God, he doesn’t know how to do basic
math,” David said.

David took out a notebook and demonstrated that
2011, that year, minus 1986, the year David was born, is 25, not 15.

The police chief took the notebook from David
and analyzed the equation he’d written out closely. He then showed it to his
two associates, who shrugged their arms and appeared to agree with David’s
math.

“Quinze! Quinze!” he screamed at us again before storming out of the room alone.

“Just give him some money,” the translator told us somberly.
“This is all he wants. He expected you to offer some money a long time ago.
Give him some money and you will go on your way.”

By telling us that, he’d just given us all the
power in that situation. The police chief didn’t want to keep us locked up in
prison for months and months. He just wanted to make some easy cash. Apparently
he didn’t expect us to be so damn difficult to deal with.

When the police chief returned he was much more
explicit about what he was after. The translator quickly explained that we
could end this situation by paying a fine.

“How much of a fine do you think you should
have to pay?” the translator asked on his behalf.

“Zero,” David said.

“But the gentleman here broke the police
officer’s pen. He must pay for this.”

David reached into his backpack and took out
another pen and offered it to the police chief.

“Here is another pen,” he said. “The issue of
the broken pen is now resolved. The debt is cleared.”

Our three adversaries looked stressed out,
tired, and angry. They sat silently for another few minutes. We returned to
reading our books. The police chief eventually raised his hand and signaled we
were free to go.

“Départ?” David asked to confirm. Departure?

The police chief handed us back our passports,
stood up, and showed us the door. We grabbed our backpacks and left. We’d won
the battle.

“You owe me a pen now you crazy motherfucker,” David said as
he put his arm around my shoulder.

About Me!

My name is Michael Bassin and I am not a spy. Despite my insistence, people continue to be suspicious of me. Syrian border policemen, Emirati sheikhs, Kurdish businessmen, Israeli army officers, African warlords, and women I meet at bars with way too much imagination are fairly convinced I'm not who I say I am.

In reality, I am an international business development professional and writer based in Tel Aviv. A former columnist on Arab affairs for the Times of Israel newspaper, I have traveled to over sixty countries and written extensively on my experiences.

I am the author of the book "I Am Not A Spy: An American Jew's Odyssey Through The Arab World & Israeli Army." The book chronicles my life as an openly Jewish student living and traveling in the Arab world and serving in the Israeli army as a combat Arabic translator in the West Bank.